Navigation

Currently Read the Docs is funded
mainly through Corporate sponsorship. The Django and Python
Software Foundations (non-profits), Mozilla, Lab305, Revsys, and
others have helped keep the site running. However, this requires
finding sponsors to help donate to the site every 6 months or so to
keep things running.

I want to try out a new idea that is effectively a subscription to
the website. When people pay for something, they expect certain
things. A promise of support, uptime, and other work are basically
being transfered in the mind of the person providing payment. I
know some places try to explicitly denounce this transaction, but
it is still there.

This is where Gittip comes in. It has the
idea of funding a person to do work through anonymous donations.
The thinking behind this is that the person recieving the money now
has no sense of obligation to the person giving money. This allows
them to take the money and continue to work on Open Source without
feeling pressured to work on the things a specific person giving
them money cares about.

I think this same idea can apply to software projects. Read the
Docs doesn’t cost a huge amount of money to run every month - it
costs a lot less than keeping a person alive and happy. So, I think
that the first success story for Gittip funding something could
easily be a project instead of a person. This funding model would
then allow Read the Docs to support itself over time - without
having to try and get support and investment again.

Read the Docs currently costs about $300/mo to run. This includes 6
servers (2 web, LB, Build, Database, Util/Monitoring), over 350GB
of data transfered, over 100GB of repositories, and it serves over
3 million page views every month. We expect these costs to slowly
rise as we get more and more traffic, but that is the goal we are
currently aiming to hit. Head to the
Read the Docs gittip page
if you want to help out.

This is the beauty of Gittip - when 75 different people are giving
you $4 a month ($1 a week), one can stop giving and it doesn’t
totally destroy the funding. It allows other people to pick up the
slack, and to sustain a dependable revenue stream for the project.

This is an experiment that I am going to try running to see if we
can get individual sponsorship for the project, instead of
depending on corporate sponsors for the sole source of support.
Once this is achieved, we will look at other ways to spend the
sponsorship we get from corporations, perhaps in more traditional
efforts to advance the code base.

Update: Wow! We reached the goal of $75 in around 14 hours.
Thanks everyone who has donated to help keep the site running! It
looks like we might reach above our weekly goal. For now, that
money will just be left in an account to help pay for future growth
of the site. If we end up making way more than we need, we’ll find
something awesome to do with it (CDN?!).